Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely brilliant

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Chester Conklin, Sylvia Ashton, Oscar Gottell, Otto Gottell, Frank Hayes, Tempe Pigott, Dale Fuller "Originally planned to run around ten hours but hacked to just over two by Thalberg's MGM, Erich Von Stroheim's greatest film still survives as a true masterpiece of cinema. Even now its relentlessly cynical portrait of physical and moral squalor retains the ability to shock, while the Von's obsessive attention to realist detail - both in terms of the San Francisco and Death Valley locations, and the minutely observed characters - is never prosaic: as the two men and a woman fall out over filthy lucre, their motivations are explored with a remarkably powerful visual poetry, and Frank Norris' novel is translated into the cinematic equivalent of, say, Zola at the peak of his powers." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out Selected by Guillermo Del Toro, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Simon Louvish, Carol J. Clover, Antonio Rodrigues.

"Greed" is a naturalistic, gritty silent from 1924, directed by Erich von Stroheim. Its storyline centers around three very unremarkable people who slowly lose their minds over money, and culminates with one of the most powerful, desolate, haunting closures in film history.The fact that it provides a street level view of life 90 years ago makes it a fascinating film by default, and one of the main attractions of the movie is seeing life through the eyes of - perhaps - your great-grandparents. The overarching story is fairly strong, but is told at a leisurely pace that resembles actual life more than tightly scripted drama. Which is fine, if you have an evening to spare, and like that sort of thing.Of course, "Greed" is famous for being 9 hours long before the studios butchered it. While I can imagine a 9-hour version of this story to be very immersive and rewarding, I can also imagine it to be extremely tedious and over-the-top. I watched the pretty good 239-minute restoration, but there was no way I could devour it in one session... Von Stroheim is consistently faithful to his realistic ethos, but the dynamics are often lacking. (Which is particular to this movie, not to 1920s movie-making in general.)The verdict: Landmark movie with a unique feel and a few moments of genius. Recommended for fans of realism.

Erich von Stroheim directs "Greed", a classic of silent cinema. Famously shot on over 440 reels of celluloid, only to have over four hundred and thirty reels slashed by mega-studio Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, the film has been shown over the decades with wildly differing running-times, some cuts running between eight and ten hours long, some four hours and some a mere one hundred and twenty minutes. MGM eventually burnt most of the film's footage in 1957, supposedly to free up storage space (and extract silver nitrate from "Greed's" film-stock). Stroheim died that same year. In 1999, American producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed "Greed" using Stroheim's preproduction material and continuity script (dated March, 1923). Using photographs, stills and title-cards, his cut attempted to restore the film to Stroheim's original intentions. As Schmidlin's cut still barely resembles Stroheim's mammoth 9 hour "director's cut", "Greed" is typically classified as a "lost film".Epic in scope, "Greed" revolves around a gang of friends, one of whom is failed gold miner Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland). After winning a lottery, the gang progressively destroy one another, some losing their minds, jobs, and some subjecting the others to various forms of inhumanity, betrayal and violence. Sounds straightforward? The film is actually very nuanced (the MGM cuts reduce the film to sensational silliness), though you wouldn't know this from any of the shorter cuts of the film. Whole subplots and chunks were removed such that Stroheim's rich canvas gets condensed into a fairly mundane, melodramatic love triangle. The film's longer cuts, however, hint at a better picture, with numerous little scenes and rich details. What becomes apparent in these cuts is that the film's title refers not only to gold, money and sex, but to all desire, which turn Stroheim's characters into grotesque little schemers. Born in Austria, Stroheim skewers a very specific set of American myths – liberty, independence, individualism, Manifest Destiny – as his film portrays masses of immigrants adsorbed by a United States which swallow identities, bulldozes cultures and breeds insular pockets. Everyone here is motivated by a creed of self-interest and self-protection, hoping and hoping and scrambling over the hopes of others. One gets the sense of a compulsive busyness but a fundamental emptiness, the false promise of endless opportunity matched by a fear of being cast permanently adrift.Not strictly Expressionistic, the film nevertheless contains very big, expressionistic strokes, which attempt to convey a kind of festering cruelty, which grows and grows before consuming totally. The film ends in Death Valley, two men scrambling for a gun in a desert, their only witness a starving donkey. The film's heavily influenced everything from "The Good The Bad And The Ugly" to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" to "There Will Be Blood" to "Seraphim Falls".?/10 - For silent film aficionados only. For decades (and even to this day) the film was mocked for being about Stroheim's own greedy need for reels upon reels of footage and film. Whether Stroheim's six and four hour cuts (which he favoured) play well today is unknown.

The audience were not able to access the over-excessive time; the lack of humor was an attribute to that as well. They couldn't handle looking at a study of a dramaturgical realistic story. So accustomed to the likes of Arbuckle, Mary Pickwalsh and so many more, Von Stroheim was known for how autocratic he was in "The Heart of Humanity", and this fundamentally changed his image from an immigrant to the bad guy.The story involves Mcteague (Gibson Gowland), a young boy working in the mines; his Mother puts him under the wing of a Dentist, so that he can aspire to something; he shows an aptitude in it and he is signed up to work in Dentist with him. His Friend Markus is given his establishing scene, and we see Mcteague's love interest, Trina (Zasu Pitts) Markus' cousin; the way he initially embraces her is just deeply intimate with her before he gives her a procedure and this underlines the depth of the movie. The Grannis characters are another subplot he centers on; we see how they're deprived of money and have a lust for it. There is another subplot involving Maria, who is a subject of the same thing; riddled with money, but incapable of keeping it with the extravaganza she can spend it with and in such high dosages.Trina gets a bootleg of a lottery ticket and she wins $5,000 through it; she then indulges with it and so does McTeague; however in the duration of their marriage, they idle away, McTeague's establishment is taken over and he becomes redundant, he becomes a drunken dipsomaniac, lost to hitting his wife and feigning his love for her "I'm in a turn" - he goes for houses near the point, but aware that she is prodigal, they struggle to get one.From Frank Norris' novel, he speaks of the charlatan without respect and rightfully so; like in "Citizen Kane" and in modern days "The Social Network", avaricious misers get lost to nothing but Dystopia; what's fascinating is how Von Stroheim directs the actors in a very unbinding but really brutal way. The golden tooth that McTeague finds is his "jewel" and he gives it back to the person who owns his Dentist Establishment.The movie is just brilliant! It is even reconstructed through panels of images in a lot of parts to constitute to its 4hr length, but the metaphors, like a metaphor for gluttony when Stroheim makes everybody at the wedding gorge their selves on food is just a sense that he is truly trying to make us feel this concept sensuously. They are unable to change their house...McTeague gorging into his money is then the real focal point of the movie. It chronicles the mans troubles and instincts at wealth, and even turning on the people that blossom his life. Even when he negotiates with his Friend to take her out of his tutelage, you feel a genuine sense of self indulgence. From what the movie says in its intertitles for exposition, she does have a baby as well.However, now on to why I love it: I love it because Stroheim's brass, bleak and uncompromising reality very much challenges that of our own intrinsic qualities, but dramatised so far that it becomes an extension of the deeper and inhumane; themes so associated now a days, but never done quite as well. Frank Norris said (paraphrased) that he was trying to show this in his novel.Also the cross cutting of Stroheim as he utilizes a Cat's face and puts it frame by frame to the redundancy of Mcteague is deliberately off key; when looking into it is also a rapacious prey looking for its scraps of food as well. Like in "Birth of a Nation" where Griffith uses a Cat and a Dog to portray Hostility, Stroheim is akin to that in that scene. From the very beginning McTeague drunk heartily in celebrations; the pain of his fall makes it all the more unbearable. But withering to the idea established, it fits appropriately. The movie has a certain core that fits tightly into it; it's like a painting, created with the strokes of fervor, only to simplify the intricate idea of life, hindsight or just the wholehearted desires. The thing is the Grannis, Marie and Mcteagues all had it coming in hindsight and this is what is, maybe not endearing, but rather hard hitting.I like Chaplin and so on, but they don't have this type of awe-inspiring effect that "Greed" has on me; inspiring "Sunset" on a way and imbuing an unfortunate legacy as being the most sought out gem of the silent era. However, the version I had was 3hrs 55mins and I would recommend getting this one; it's a hard DVD to locate, but it is possible to get one; you just have to scrutinize the internet and there you will most likely find a copy.For what ever it costs, this movie is definitely warranted for repeated viewings; the "movie" shouldn't even be deemed a movie. It should be deemed a relic from a time, lurking underneath the "golden mines" it seems; the film fanatics all want to excavate it, and collect it, and I was in the same position because I dislike watching movies on the Internet.But for all it's worth, Turner Classic Movies have done a sublime job at reduxing this. Brutally passionate and uncompromising, "Greed" is a movie that shouldn't be dismissed; not by anybody with any serious output to Cinema; it's there as a personal statement for both Stroheim (I think) in his extravagant budgets for movies (this one cost $500,000) and what cinema can do to our manipulation as a spectator; the length only proves that he was really trying to do a story with turns and twists and by doing so has fleshed it out to embrace the suspense.